Food News: Gourmet's All-Time-Best Recipes

Food News: Gourmet's All-Time-Best Recipes

I was standing on the check-out line at Whole Foods when I spotted this. Just in time to get us engaged with fall cooking before everything in the food world becomes all-holiday-all-the-time, Gourmet has published another one of their wonderful special editions. This one they call All-Time-Best-Recipes. I'm not sure what makes this particular collection of 195 recipes the all-time-best, but they are modern and inspiring cook-them-today recipes taken from the Gourmet archives that go back to 1941. And by my test cooking so far, they are very worthy of your kitchen, time, best ingredients, and your appetites.

It has 120 pages, is printed like a magazine except there are NO ADVERTISEMENTS (except for its own upcoming Holiday Baking special edition), and a gorgeous color photograph of every, single, recipe.

The recipes range from the simple to the profound, both in cooking methods and tastes. They cover multiple ethnicities yet the ingredients are obtainable. So far I've made roasted carrots with thyme and garlic, roasted sweet-potato spears with bacon vinaigrette, and fiery buffalo salmon. But I've only had the issue for four days. I've got Post-Its stuck on about another 20 others that are next up.

The intro to the issue challenges us with "we dare you not to dog-ear every page," which captures the way I felt on my first reading.

The cost is $12.95, which is more than a monthly magazine and less than a cookbook. But if you consider how many recipes you will probably really want to make and that also have the potential of becoming part of your regular cooking, to me the price is a good value. Besides, this is from the folks at Gourmet, and do we have to say one more time how many of us still mourn the loss of its monthly magazine. This special issue is a good example of why.